Yellowstone Quake

            Kaboom!

            The sound was deafening. It rattled the windows and shook the walls. It seemed to suck the air right out of the room as it moved off.

            Instinctively. I dashed for the door. My boss chuckled.

            “That was a sonic boom.”

            The date was August 18, 1959, my 15^th birthday. Though I loved airplanes and wanted to be a jet fighter pilot, breaking the sound barrier for the first time over my little town on that particular day was a dumb thing to do.

            The night before I was awakened about midnight by my bunk bed shaking violently. It was dark and I was sleepy, so I shrugged it off. Maybe one of my brothers had come home on leave from the service and crawled into the top bunk.

            When the alarm rang at 5:30 AM, I got up, dressed, and had a bowl of Shredded Wheat. Then I dashed off to my job at Markles Hardware Store. My first task was to sweep the floor and the front sidewalk. By the time I finished, the usual crowd of old-timers had gathered in the front of the store to discuss everything from wheat prices to the national debt. Those topics had been forgotten today.

            “Turn on the TV! There was an earthquake last night.”

            Earthquake? I wondered. Those only happen in California. I had visited there once and saw repairs in the roads from earthquake cracks. I’d seen earthquaukes in far-off places like Japan and Turkey on the Movietone Newsreels.. Those things never happened here, did they?

            The TV hummed as electrons woke up the cathode ray tube. A wavy image of a newscaster appeared.

            “The quake was centered about 15 miles north of West Yellowstone, Montana. Access to the area is blocked due to multiple landslides. The National Earthquake Reporting Center registered the shock as a 7.2 on the Richter Scale. That is roughly the same size as the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. That would be a devastating number had it hit a populated area.”

            Populated area? I thought. Do they think Montana doesn’t have any people? Hell, there are over 3 people per square mile in this state. And at this time of the year Yellowstone Park is full of tourists.  I had been there and I knew.

            “There are reports that a mountain has slid into the valley of the Madison River. The area is frequented by fishermen and campers.”

            Excuse me? A mountain slid into a river? Preposterous! I went back to work. Business was slow, but people kept gathering in the front of the TV.

            “I camped on the Madison last year, at Hebgen Lake,” someone said.

            “Hebgen Lake? The radio just said it had waves over 20 feet tall when the quake hit. They are trying to get to the campgrounds, but the roads are all blocked.”

            Then the TV announcer mentioned aftershocks, two big ones about 6.0. The weathered old men in the store began to look serious. Montana had floods and blizzards, never an earthquake.  This one had been felt a thousand miles away. We were about 300 air miles from the epicenter and it had woken nearly everyone up.

            I got home in time to catch the evening news. The bad news kept coming in. Pictures showed a shattered mountain sitting in the middle of a quiet valley where a campground had once been. This dammed the river and a lake was filling up fast. The road had fallen into it. Part of an overturned car was poking out from the debris.

            Eyewitness reports started to trickle in. People were trapped. There was a frantic effort to reopen shattered roadways. A few lucky people had somehow left just before the quake hit. A deaf woman was reported to have felt the tremors early. Animals had gotten excited and tried to warn their owners. Boaters remembered that Hebgen Lake had been inexplicably choppy just before the quake hit. Other people said they had barely missed the quake because the campground was full, or someone got sick, or they had car trouble. Those who had found their ideal camping spot weren’t so lucky.

Survivors remembered a huge roar as the top of the mountain slid into the Madison. Material moved with such speed that it created its own wind. A woman barely escaped as her house slid into the water. A couple in their 70’s clung to a tree for over six hours before being rescued by a boat. One camper was a nurse who helped others. Her picture, black eye and all, made it into Life Magazine. Phone lines at the Red Cross and the Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office  were jammed with people looking for missing loved ones. There was another aftershock.

            Virtually everyone in Montana felt the quake. Kids remember being thrown out of bed. The closer they were, the greater the shaking. Walls cracked and chimneys fell in Bozeman. Houses shifted off their foundations. Three hundred new geysers erupted in Yellowstone Park. Almost overnight, Quake Lake on the Madison River filled up. Quake Lake is still there. Its current average depth of 47 feet over its 6-mile length would be higher had the Corps of Engineers not moved massive amounts of debris restoring the channel.  It took 3 days to get all the survivors out. The records of the campground were buried, so no one knew how many people were lost. Authorities finally settled on a casualty count of 28 souls. Most of the bodies were never recovered.

            By the end of the day, I felt older than my 15 years. The world was no longer the quiet, comfortable place that had nurtured me, and kept me safe. Unknown dangers lurked out there. Security is not a given.

            Years later, I learned that the Yellowstone Quake was only a precursor of the next explosive geothermal event that could happen in Yellowstone. Indeed, the Yellowstone super volcano explodes every 600 to 800 thousand years. The last big blast dwarfed the Mount St Helens eruption many of us witnessed in 1980. It buried places 400 miles away with a dozen feet of ash. No one knows when it will blow again. The last blast was 640,000 years ago putting us well within the window for the next one. When it does blow, and it will, its impact will devastate much of the American West.

            Should we be concerned? Maybe. There are still seventy and eighty-year-old Montanans who retain the trauma they felt as children on the night the mountain fell.

LDT August 18, ‘25

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